中国古代不少诗人、文学家都是创作谜语的高手。宋代（公元960年—1127年）的王安石就是其中的一位。

有一天，他对一位朋友说：“我给你出个字谜吧。 你听好了：画时圆，写时方；冬时短，夏时长。这是什么字？”朋友听完以后，并没有直接回答他，反而也给他出了一个谜语，朋友说：“东海有条鱼，无头又无尾，除去脊梁骨，就是这个谜。”王安石听了，高兴地笑了起来。

原来，他们两个人出的字谜，谜底都是“日”字。“日”字的意思就是“太阳”，“太阳”画出来是圆的，写成汉字却是方的。冬天的时候，从日出到日落的时间比较短；夏天的时候，从日出到日落的时间比较长。所以，王安石的谜底是“日”字。我们再来看他朋友的字谜，朋友的意思是说：“鱼”字没有头也没有尾巴，也就是说要去掉“鱼”字上面的“刀”（“头”）和下面的“一”（“尾巴”），剩下的就是一个“田”字，再把“田”字中间的“脊梁骨”（“丨”）去掉，就也成了“日”字。

 

Many men of letters in ancient China were well versed in making up riddles about Chinese characters. Wang Anshi, a renowned scholar in the Song dynasty (AD 960-1127), was one of them.

One day Wang Anshi said to a friend: “Would you like to guess a riddle about a character? Listen to me carefully. When you draw a picture of it, it is a circle. When you write it down, it is a square. It is short in winter and long in summer. What is it?” After listening to the riddle, the friend did not give him a direct answer. Instead, he told Wang Anshi another riddle: “A fish in the East Sea has neither head nor tail. If you remove its spine, you will get the key to the riddle.” Upon hearing his friend’s riddle, Wang laughed contentedly because the key to the two riddles were the same character ri (日), which means “sun”. When you draw a picture of the sun, it is of course a circle; the Chinese character 日 is written in the shape of a rectangle, which is close to a square. In winter the time from sunrise to sunset is shorter; in summer it is longer. Therefore, the key to the riddle told by Wang Anshi is 日. Now let us examine his friend’s riddle. The Chinese character for “fish” is 鱼. If we remove its upper and lower parts, i.e. the head and tail of the fish, what is left is the middle part 田. If we continue to remove the vertical stroke in the middle of the character 田, which can be said to represent the spine of the fish, what is left is also 日.